Camus Quotes

“I would like to be able to breathe— to be able to love her by memory or fidelity. But my heart aches. I love you continuously, intensely.”
― Albert Camus, Notebooks 1951-1959

“The only serious question in life is whether to kill yourself or not.”
― Albert Camus

“If there were a party of those who aren't sure they're right, I'd belong to it.
(as quoted by Tony Judt)”
― Albert Camus

“On the whole, men are more good than bad; that, however, isn't the real point. But they are more or less ignorant, and it is this that we call vice or virtue; the most incorrigible vice being that of an ignorance that fancies it knows everything and therefore claims for itself the right to kill. The soul of the murderer is blind; and there can be no true goodness nor true love without the utmost clear-sightedness.”
― Albert Camus

“One plays at being immortal and after a few weeks one doesn't even know whether or not one can hang on till the next day.”
― Albert Camus, The Fall

“I felt as though I was partly unlearning what i had never learned and yet knew so well: I mean, how to live.”
― Albert Camus, The Fall

“My soul’s a burden to me, I’ve had enough of it. I’m eager to be in that country, where the sun kills every question. I don’t belong here.”
― Albert Camus

“I hope the dogs don't bark tonight. I always think it's mine”
― Albert Camus, The Stranger

“What gives value to travel is fear. It is the fact that, at a certain moment, when we are so far from our own country … we are seized by a vague fear, and an instinctive desire to go back to the protection of old habits … this is why we should not say that we travel for pleasure. There is no pleasure in traveling, and I look upon it more as an occasion for spiritual testing … Pleasure takes us away from ourselves in the same way as distraction, in Pascal’s use of the word, takes us away from God. Travel, which is like a greater and a graver science, brings us back to ourselves.”
― Albert Camus, Notebooks, 1935-1951

“Isn't post-modernism really one big cover-up for the failure of the French to write a truly interesting novel ever since a sports car ate Albert Camus?”
― John Leonard

“Any country where I am not bored is a country that teaches me nothing.”
― Albert Camus

“If it were sufficient to love, things would be too easy. The more one loves the stronger the absurd grows.”
― Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus

“there are truths but no truth”
― Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus

“What we call fundamental truths are simply the ones we discover after all the others.”
― Albert Camus

“In order to cease being a doubtful case, one has to cease being, that's all.”
― Albert Camus, The Fall

“And thus to my final and most melancholy point: a great number of Stalin's enforcers and henchmen in Eastern Europe were Jews. And not just a great number, but a great proportion. The proportion was especially high in the secret police and 'security' departments, where no doubt revenge played its own part, as did the ideological attachment to Communism that was so strong among internationally minded Jews at that period: Jews like David Szmulevski. There were reasonably strong indigenous Communist forces in Czechoslovakia and East Germany, but in Hungary and Poland the Communists were a small minority and knew it, were dependent on the Red Army and aware of the fact, and were disproportionately Jewish and widely detested for that reason. Many of the penal labor camps constructed by the Nazis were later used as holding pens for German deportees by the Communists, and some of those who ran these grim places were Jewish. Nobody from Israel or the diaspora who goes to the East of Europe on a family-history fishing-trip should be unaware of the chance that they will find out both much less and much more than the package-tour had promised them. It's easy to say, with Albert Camus, 'neither victims nor executioners.' But real history is more pitiless even than you had been told it was.”
― Christopher Hitchens, Hitch 22: A Memoir

“I certainly didn't concur with Edward on everything, but I was damned if I would hear him abused without saying a word. And I think this may be worth setting down, because there are other allegiances that can be stress-tested in comparable ways. It used to be a slight hallmark of being English or British that one didn't make a big thing out of patriotic allegiance, and was indeed brimful of sarcastic and critical remarks about the old country, but would pull oneself together and say a word or two if it was attacked or criticized in any nasty or stupid manner by anybody else. It's family, in other words, and friends are family to me. I feel rather the same way about being an American, and also about being of partly Jewish descent. To be any one of these things is to be no better than anyone else, but no worse. When confronted by certain enemies, it is increasingly the 'most definitely no worse' half of this unspoken agreement on which I tend to lay the emphasis. (As with Camus’s famous 'neither victim nor executioner,' one hastens to assent but more and more to say 'definitely not victim.')”
― Christopher Hitchens, Hitch 22: A Memoir

“- Tu es et tu resteras toujours une petite-bourgeoise moraliste. Comme Camus.
- Tu es et tu resteras toujours un petit con prétencieux. Comme Sartre.”
― Jean-Michel Guenassia, Le Club des incorrigibles optimistes

“So for me Meursault is not a reject, but a poor and naked man, in love with a sun which leaves no shadows. Far from lacking all sensibility, he is driven by a tenacious and therefore profound passion, the passion for an absolute and for truth.”
― Albert Camus, The Stranger

“La lucha por llegar a las cumbres basta para llenar un corazón de hombre. Hay que imaginarse a Sísifo feliz.”
― Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus

“What did Albert Camus say? It's not one thing or the other that leads to madness; it's the space in between them.”
― Jeanette Winterson, Night Side of the River

“Ici même, je sais que jamais je ne m'approcherai assez du monde. Il me faut être nu
et puis plonger dans la mer, encore tout parfumé des essences de la terre, laver celles-ci dans celle-là, et nouer sur ma peau l'étreinte
pour laquelle soupirent lèvres à lèvres depuis si longtemps la terre et la mer. Entré dans l'eau, c'est le saisissement, la montée d'une glu
froide et opaque, puis le plongeon dans le bourdonnement des oreilles, le nez coulant et la bouche amère - la nage, les bras vernis
d'eau sortis de la mer pour se dorer dans le soleil et rabattus dans une torsion de tous les muscles; la course de l'eau sur mon corps,
cette possession tumultueuse de l'onde par mes jambes - et l'absence d'horizon. Sur le rivage, c'est la chute dans le sable, abandonné au
monde, rentré dans ma pesanteur de chair et d'os, abruti de soleil, avec, de loin en loin, un regard pour mes bras où les flaques de peau
sèche découvrent, avec le glissement de l'eau, le duvet blond et la poussière de sel.”
― Albert Camus, Noces suivi de L'été

“I may not have been sure about what really did interest me, but I was absolutely sure about what didn’t.”
― Matt Haig, The Midnight Library

“I sit in the coffee shop waiting for night and I watch the same people scratch their asses at the same tables behind the same windows. I think of Camus, lovely and brittle, and the gunman on the sands and know I'll be here tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow with these lovely blue-gray sharks dwarfing the evening with their self-important air, looking into the murky bottoms of coffee cups and smoking my never-ending cigarettes.”
― Scott C. Holstad, Never-Ending Cigarettes

“I exalt man be-fore what crushes him, and
my freedom, my revolt, and my passion come together then in that
tension, that lucidity, and that vast repetition.”
― Albert Camus

“We smile for Sisyphus, not that he rejoices, but in our hearts, we paint his endless labor with the colours of our own hope.”
― Syed Buali Gillani

“Imagine if everybody on the earth stopped what they were doing and listened to Beethoven's 9th symphony... Or If everybody watched the moon at night without saying a word. Maybe it wouldn't fix our problems but it would just maybe give us a sliver of world peace. Or maybe it wouldn't make a difference, the human ego is pretty stubborn.”
― Albert Ahlf

“Sonuçta ne kadar hissizleşsen bile, genç yaşta annesiz kalan bir genç isen ve hayatın uydurma bir roman değilse, Mersault kadar kayıtsız kalabilmek zor işti.”
― Tolga Gökçen, Yalnızlaşan İnsan

“De un administrador de inmuebles que se mató me decían un día que había perdido a su hija hacía cinco años, que desde entonces había cambiado mucho y que esa historia "lo había minado". Imposible desear una palabra más exacta. Comenzar a pensar es comenzar a estar minado. La sociedad no tiene mucho que ver con estos comienzos. El gusano se encuentra en el corazón del hombre. Allí hay que buscarlo. Es preciso seguir y comprender el juego moral que lleva de la lucidez frente a la existencia a la evasión fuera de la luz.”
― Camus Albert, The Myth of Sisyphus

“¿Cuál es, pues, ese incalculable sentimiento que priva al espíritu del sueño necesario para su vida? Un mundo que podemos explicar, aunque sea con malas razones, es un mundo familiar. Pero en cambio, en un universo privado de pronto de ilusiones y de luces, el hombre se siente extranjero. Es un destierro sin remedio, pues está privado de los recuerdos de una patria perdida o de la esperanza de una tierra prometida. Ese divorcio entre el hombre y su vida, el actor y su decorado, es propiamente el sentimiento de lo absurdo. Y omo todos los hombres sanos han pensado en el suicidio, cabe reconocer, sin más explicaciones, que hay un lazo directo entre ese sentimiento y la aspiración a la nada.”
― Camus Albert, The Myth of Sisyphus